Le Marriage et Le Travaille

January 31, 2009 by 1 Comment

Dearest Millicent,
I think you are wandering in a forest somewhere. Perhaps in the fog or at the buffet in a boat-shaped restaurant? Wherever you are, I hope you return to us soon. Our cozy tearoom is lonely when all I have to chat with is the embroidered floral chair across the way (it’s next to the picture of you on the camel (sepia tone, of course)).

I’m writing because of a convergence of blog posts and my own life. As you well know, Mr. Carla Fran and I have the same profession (if either of us can actually boldly claim “writing” as our profession, but it is on our tax forms, so…). Many are warned not to marry within the profession: too much jealousy, not enough money. And one of our great gripes is the balance between work. His work is part of his every day routine, and almost as much a priority in his life as a cup of coffee. My work (while I would say equally important) is not as daily as coffee, and I tend to eek and squish it into my schedule when nobody is looking. This means that I often witness his focus, and he rarely sees mine. It also means that he often changes plans around his work, while I often change my work for plans (thus the eeking and squishing). Neither of us is wrong in our behaviors, but it does make us (mainly me) a little, shall we say….itchy…every once in awhile. Today, I got itchy.

Yesterday, I read Courtney’s post at feministing about “The Pandora’s Box of Cohabitation” , about how one is caught in the vice of “to nag or not to nag.” She writes about a box her boyfriend won’t put away, and how she mainly aims to remain calm and not freak out over the box that is driving her crazy. He does eventually put it away for his own reasons, but for her, the worry blooms into a model of what shared responsibility might be in their future: her bending, trying to be patient, silently quite irked, while he does what he wants. She threads this into a reverie of what childrearing might look like, and the devastation such a model could plausibly create.

Today, there was a discussion on the Huffington Post and NY Times about the same thing, but now totally focused on the parenting aspect. Apparently there are many moms that feel like they do the majority of the managing of parenthood. It boiled down to moms doing all of the mental work (shoe sizes, valentines for class, friends) while dads popped in and drove the van every once in awhile.

When I first read Courtney’s post, I thought it was a little hyperbolic, but I think I understand the worry that she was simply brave enough to offer in its full articulation. In general, we do bend more, put more aside, hold our tongues and rearrange (some of this due to the fear of looking like the dreaded bitch/nag)? Or, maybe many a marriage crisis is based on both partners thinking they are doing all the bending. The NY Times article mentioned that no fathers gave their side. I’m sure a good reporter could find some dads that are rockstars at shared work, but would that be representative?

Mr. Carla Fran is a bit of a rockstar in considering my needs, but (and I might agree with him on this) when it comes down to our argument about rearrangement/itchiness/bending, the answer usually is that I am the one with the negative behavior; I am the one putting myself in the overextended situation that I am then mad at him for. Is this ultimately one more repetition of the model, or a possible me-shaped door that I can learn to open?

In short, everybody thinks they are working quite hard, but is there a way to navigate this common place without turning into Balky (yes, I am referencing “Perfect Strangers”) or Andy Capp (not the hot fries, the comic strip, where he is always on the run from his terrible hag wife)?

Yours,
CF

(For other posts on marriage and work, see “Beowulf and Marriage, Gifts and Work.”)

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Odd Saint: Jean-Baptiste Lully

December 10, 2008 by Leave a comment

Actually, this fellow was the opposite of a saint.  He did a lot of ladies, and a lot of fellows, but libertine shmibertine! He had a weird death, and so I write of him today.

Jean-Baptiste Lully, pre-gangrene

Jean-Baptiste Lully, pre-gangrene

Born in 1632, he is responsible for bringing the grand edge of spectacle to French opera.  He was very into stage effects and dance (which makes him comparable to Baz Luhrman in my mind).  According to Fred Plotkin’s Opera 101, Lully was every bit as intense and dramatic as his operas.  He oversaw all rehearsals, and one day, while pounding out the beat with a stick, he pounded so hard that he accidentally “drove the pole through his foot.” And then he died of the gangrene because he wouldn’t let them cut off the infected parts.

So, lesson learned. if you get involved while you work, do your best to make sure you don’t pierce any limb with your instruments. It’s like biting on a fork while eating, but awful.

Filed under Booooks, Odd Saints Tagged with , , , , ,

Cafe Culture: “Working”

November 24, 2008 by Leave a comment

Carla Fran, tender churl,

I conducted an experiment in public solitude yesterday and thought I would acquaint you with the results. In some respects it resembles the challenge of looking “come-hithery” while learning the musculature of the belly-dance chest circle.

The goal: to try “working” at a “cafe” in “the city.” This is something people do. I haven’t been getting any work done at home. Yes, it’s always struck me as faintly silly that people claim to seriously work in a cafe, where others congregate to caffeinate and talk, but I suspended my disbelief. Or lied to myself about my intentions.

After noodling around for five or six hours and selecting some reading material, I boarded the subway and took off. I found, to my surprise, that somewhere along the ride I became a jumpy, sunken, resentful version of myself–a version left over from my college days, when I loathed the starlets in the making and the Prada-be-backpacked sorority women and felt a little (okay, a lot) contemptuous of everyone around me.

It might have something to do with my contact with the sciences too. They bring out a deeply serious version of me, all curves and percentages and amino acid structures. Thank God I took some time away, or I would have been singularly humorless.

The serious, paranoid and sullen me walked moodily into the cafe and sat down at a table next to a couple.

A few words about rage: I attended a football-watching event at a local bar on Saturday. A friend asked that I be her wing-man. I agreed and spent most of the afternoon seething at the bizarre structures that reproduce endlessly around the institute of the Football Game: the ironed-straight blondes with their makeup and yellow t-shirts, the tall toothy Ken-dolls high-fiving each other in coordinated and unimaginably off-putting shows of bro-love, the Jack Daniels booths, shirts and games, the abundance of sneakers, the wetness and elbowing and braying.

I wondered, as these feelings eddied and surged, erupting occasionally in derisive snorts, whether classism or snobbery had seeped into my impeccably fair-and-balanced world view. Sitting in the cafe, observing the comically loud man–an academic, it became clear–bellowing ironic idiocies at the slightly drunk girl next to me, who kept brandishing and nearly spilling her beverage, I was pleased to find that my hostility and spite transcend social categories.

Back to the cafe. I’ll never forget this time when I was in Atlanta, also sitting in a cafe. I’d decided to sit there and write whatever was around me. I landed on a guy sitting on the couch to my left. So I wrote about him. As I wrote, I noticed him glancing at me every so often. He had a notebook too. Growing suspicious, I got up. Mimed–in the way one does, to total strangers with whom one doesn’t otherwise communicate–that I had to go to the bathroom. As I walked past I glanced down at his notebook. He was drawing me. I was writing him, he was drawing me. Together we’d created an unmeaning closed circuit of artsy-fartsy solipsism. So much for the naive subject.

Eh. Forget it. I’ll never really get back to the cafe. Which by this point had turned into more of a bar anyway. The loud couple took over my table. The cafe transitioned to beer; I stuck with coffee. I talked to an Indian about his ambition to live in Dubai. He was sweet but silly-looking. An earnest contrast to the assortment of men there, one of whom had borrowed his hairstyle from Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia. The youth’s proud livery of many sideburns, many hats. I felt self-conscious about my hair.

The work I did: laughable. Yes, electric energy. Stimulating noise. But if hairs be wires and black wires grow on our heads, mine weren’t sparking for proper brain-work. Don’t know if it’s the sort of thing I could learn to do. I arrived home exhausted and filled with phlegm. Felt bleak, a little like I’d stolen something from myself.

So, where can a person do real work? Well, I’m home after a day of more-than-usual production. Find that the key to focusing at the library is a) reading in a recumbent position, but face down b) listening to classical Indian music and c) using hair to fashion a curtain around me so that I’m not visually distracted. It’s not always easy to find an available couch, and my arms get a workout holding half of me up while I read. Sometimes they even shake. Still, I’ve made some progress today, arm tremor be damned. And nobody was drawing me.

Fondly,
Millicent

Filed under Experiments, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Riffle Raffle

October 28, 2008 by Leave a comment

Dear Millicent,

I am grading speeches my students made.   None are gorgeous examples of oratory elegance.  Some are shocks of poor logic.  Most are pretty much unengaged.  Yesterday, in class, I had to actually mentally cool my blood as two students gave wildly inarticulate speeches about abortion.  If I teach this class again, I now know that there are some topics to avoid.  One argument was that abortion should be legal because all unwanted babies are abused if they are born, and they are innocent and never asked to be born or abused (this was accompanied by lots of graphic child abuse pictures).  And then, ending our day, was a speech which started off about Prop 4 (the abortion parental consent proposition on the ballot in our golden state (it is nice, though, to say our ) but somehow ended up being a vivid description of “partial birth abortion.”  Internally I got all ranty, not at my student’s views, but at their lack of information and their lack of critical thinking.  I understand my politics have no place in the classroom, although I did have to bite my lip (the student discussing Prop 4 also mentioned that she was pretty sure abortion was illegal here, which is so painful, because, if it wasn’t legal, then why are we voting about something as bureaucratic as parental consent!), but is it too much to suggest thorough sources (beyond videos watched in Confirmation class)? It reminded me of Alabama, and the student’s assumption that Christianity was the lingua franca of any group.  It irks me when people disagree with me (childishly so), but it triple-irks me when my total agreement is assumed pre-message.  And if you were wondering, yes, I am feeling ranty today.

Also, I offered the play Wit as a bit of off-syllabus reading to fill in for a obviously boring research project, and all of the students nixed it.  They thought it sounded blah.  I might force it on them anyways.  And then see them writhe as we examine John Donne in order to have a fuller appreciation for what is at work. Ha!

And they aren’t even bad students.  I should calm down. 

On other fronts, I visited my old town last weekend.  It was strange, but all still there. 

How are you? Is the world aligning? Thickening? Making new structures of ions and glitter?  Do you think, before this year is out, that we should adopt babies and name them after fabrics…mine will be Damask, yours can be Peu de Soie? 

Or, we could just eat Sara Lee, and read war novels?

Do you have a Halloween costume, darling?

Yours,

CF

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

Notes on His Girl Friday

September 29, 2008 by Leave a comment

  • I love your take on the hat’s journey from couture to cap. I love her coat. I loved her interview with poor Earl. “Production for use.” Interesting take on journalism too—they clearly have no problem becoming part of the story.
  • Cary Grant’s character is pretty repellent. His saving grace seems to be that he’s exceptionally funny and immensely active. Funny how attractive that combination can be, and how completely it overcomes his other shortcomings.
  • I think the title refers to Defoe’s Man Friday in Robinson Crusoe—a “native” from a neighboring island with ability and smarts who keeps Crusoe alive (after Crusoe helps deliver him from being cannibalized by his own people).
  • The movie’s a remake of an older movie called Front Page. Hildy should have been a guy. It was only when Howard Hawks’ secretary read the lines that he decided to cast the character as a woman. I think this might explain why it’s such a great part.
  • Molly Malloy doesn’t die—they say several times that she’s moving. But this doesn’t change the fact that no one seems to much mind her attempted suicide. I guess we’re supposed to take that opening caption seriously: “It all happened in the “dark ages” of the newspaper game – – when to a reporter “getting that story” justified anything short of murder.” Were you sorry you never got to hear Hildy’s story? I was. I wonder whether Molly’s attempt would have entered into it.
  • Why, in the name of all that’s holy, does Cary Grant tap the rolltop desk three times? I’ve watched it twice and I still don’t get it. Did he screw up, or did he want Earl to show himself?
  • He did have the whole planned out. He gave Louie directions to pay her back with counterfeit money. So he made sure Bruce would be in jail.
  • The luggage she’s carrying at the end is hers. My take is that, although at the beginning she objects to the fact that he’s not a conventional gentleman–he won’t invite her to sit down, she has to ask him for a cigarette, then for a light, then tell him not to walk ahead of her, etc.—she’s decided by the end that he offers her access to something she likes better. Makes sense, I guess. She’s not much of a gentleman herself; seems totally unperturbed by the journalists’ abuse of Molly.
  • I do find it weird that she’s so attracted to the idea of being a housewife. Doesn’t seem quite right. It’s interesting, though, that she lets slip, while typing out her story and distractedly fighting with Bruce, that she’s glad he’s going if he thought she was going to be some suburban wife and he was going to try to change her.
  • After Molly leaves the first time the journalists are totally deflated and uninterested in their poker game. They’re ashamed of themselves. This scene seemed both ugly and right.
  • I totally missed the rum thing. And yes, the mock turtle line is spectacular.

Fondly,
Millicent

Filed under Movies, Nitpicks, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Schizophrenia, Hyper-Mentalism, and the Happy Puppet

September 15, 2008 by 2 Comments

Couldn’t stop thinking about it.

What to make of the Firecracker’s attraction to schizophrenia as a word and lifestyle, and why did it become the writer-singer-songwriter’s passport into a different kind of world? Schizophrenia, after all, goes beyond the mere desire for altered states of mind. Yeah, Coleridge loved opium, but this exceeds drugs, hallucinations, trumps the scope and governance of the will. Is this why it’s appealing? Is it a release from an oppressive hyper-consciousness? Is it a kind of Fate?

As evidence that what I’m saying actually happens, and that the word crops up in oddly reverential ways, some examples:

  • Talking about Lynch’s union of the banal and the grotesque, DFW says, admiringly, that “there’s a certain schizophrenia about it.”
  • From “In the Company of Creeps”, an article in Publisher’s Weekly:

    Wallace characterizes the public reception of both Infinite Jest and a followup essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown, 1997) as a ‘schizophrenia of attention.’

  • The Firecracker I married described his turmoil over whether or not his desires were compatible with being married to me as being sliced in half while in the shower. He called this his schizophrenia, and declared finally that his interest in madness isn’t intellectual, but religious. In my lower moments I think he yearns for it.

My sister is schizophrenic. She’s plagued daily by origami devils and monster faces in her food. She spends hours tracking down hackers breaking into her computer, scratches strips of skin off to get at the bugs beneath, turns sly and calculating whenever a collection agency calls to collect on one of the forty cell phone accounts she’s opened and closed and left unpaid. She resents that no one will believe that the doctor removed her temporal lobe during one the many unnecessary surgeries she’s convinced them to perform. She’s tried to kill herself three times.

I mention this to justify—or at least disclose—what might be an unreasonably rigid sense of what schizophrenia means. For me, it’s always meant a clinical condition.

So I thought I should check and see what it actually means. The word was coined in 1910 (or 1896, depending on whether you ask the OED or The Guardian). The OED defines it thusly:

A mental disorder occurring in various forms, all characterized by a breakdown in the relation between thoughts, feelings, and actions, usu. with a withdrawal from social activity and the occurrence of delusions and hallucinations.
Used in the U.S. with a broader meaning than in Britain (cf. quots. 1979, 1980).

The earlier term was “dementia praecox,” the premature unraveling of the mind. Schizophrenia means “split mind,” a term coined by Eugen Beuler to describe the splitting of mental functions. (It’s kind of ironic that these days “split-brain” patients are epileptic survivors whose corpus callosa—the bundle of fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres—have been surgically cut.)

In fact, the word seems to be losing status in the scientific community. The romance is unfelt in this quarter, and some people are trying to get rid of it as a category altogether: From Kate Hilpern’s article “Muddy Thinking” in The Guardian

“As a single word, schizophrenia can ruin a life as surely as any bullet,” says Hammersley. “I know of one woman whose psychiatrist told her it would have been better for her to have cancer. Our desire to dump schizophrenia in the diagnostic dustbin is therefore not just about the poor science that surrounds it, but the immense damage that this label brings about. Lives are being ruined on the basis of a highly suspect diagnostic system.”

Other scientists defend the label. Vague and bland as it is, to dispose of it would eliminate research funding. They’ve pressed on, and two in particular have come to a pretty awesome conclusion about a possible genetic basis for autism and schizophrenia.

Turns out the quest for a baby’s mental health is the ultimate Boy vs. Girl genetic free-for-all, the egg-and-sperm version of the bedroom scene in A Pocketful of Miracles. Nature recently published an opinion piece by Christopher Badcock (heh) and Bernard Crespi called “Battle of the Sexes”.

Here is what they found. Read more of this post

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Newer posts →